


stuck in reverse

by Acaeria



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Disordered Eating, Exhaustion, Gen, Insomnia, Sleep Deprivation, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:40:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26903764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acaeria/pseuds/Acaeria
Summary: “You’re always tired,” Steph says. “Your insomnia getting bad again?”Tim shrugs, forcing himself to his feet. “It’s not been too bad,” he says, truthful for once. “About an hour, I think.”“Hey, that’s great!” Steph says, grinning at him, utterly genuine. Tim finds it in himself to smile back, feels his skin crack with the effort.It takes the average person seven minutes to fall asleep.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 39





	stuck in reverse

**Author's Note:**

> don't mind me, just projecting my..... health(?) problems onto tim

He sits at his desk, propping his head up with a hand, gazing at the documents on his laptop screen and trying to will the words to go into his head as he reads them one, twice, three times, and cannot squeeze a single drop of meaning from them. The door swings open, and Tam walks in, looking as put-together as always.

“Good morning,” she greets. 

“Morning,” Tim mumbles back.

“How’re you doing?” She deposits a pile of papers on his desk, picks up the much smaller pile he’d left for her to take. 

“Tired,” Tim replies, trying to smile. He knows without even seeing his reflection that all he’s done is barely twitch his lips. A ghost of an expression. A thought not spoken.

“You’re always tired,” Tam says. “I know you’re a night owl, but you should really try and get more sleep.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. Doesn’t say that he got seven hours last night, six hours the night before last, and slept for a whole thirteen hours on Sunday. Ignores the flare of hurt in his chest at her words. 

“Remember, you have a meeting at two!” she calls as she leaves his office. The door clicks shut behind her and Tim takes a deep breath. Two. It doesn’t help much. It feels like there’s a hole in his chest, letting all the air out. Not a big one. This isn’t panic. This is a needlepoint in his windpipe, a slow trickle that tickles the inside of his chest. It’s fine; he’s fine. He just needs to make it to the end of this meeting, and then he can go home.

Breathe in, breathe out. He’s breathing, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel like he’s breathing at all.

* * *

The meeting goes well. Tim tries not to hate it.

It’s a good thing, really. No matter how exhausted he feels, no matter how impossible even the smallest task seems, if he has a responsibility to attend to he can do it. Do it well even. He can look shareholders and board members in the eye, can smile and frown and say all the right things in all the right tones. The perfect picture of the perfect seventeen-year-old businessman. Or something.

The meeting ends. He gets up, leaves, says goodbye to Tam. Gathers up his belongings and makes his way home. He  _ feels _ fine. As he walks, he plans his day in his head. He’ll get home, make some lunch, and spend an hour or so getting ahead of schedule with his WE paperwork before moving on to some Red Robin casework. Then Steph is coming over and they’re going to make dinner together before patrol. 

It’s a pointless endeavour, he knows, even as he unlocks his apartment door and hangs up his coat and keys. He kicks off his shoes and pushes them under the shoe rack with a single foot, before heading to the kitchen. He brews up a pot of coffee, pours himself a cup. Looks at the cupboards, at the fridge, stocked with all the ingredients he’d need to make a variety of meals and snacks. 

His stomach turns. His legs feel weak beneath him.

He takes a sip of his coffee, staggers into the living room, and collapses on the couch. He places his mug down on the coffee table and then spends some time shuffling the cushions on the couch before lying down and pulling the fuzzy blanket slung over the back onto him. 

The heaviness slams down on him again, and even though he’s expecting it it leaves him breathless. His face becomes plaster, his eyes prick with tears like shards of glass, and his head hurts. Well– it doesn’t  _ hurt _ . It’s a headache, but not an ache, per se, more like a pressure. It’s not exactly painful. It feels like parts of his brain have vaporised, turned into fog, and that fog is pressing against the inside of his skill. 

It doesn’t  _ hurt _ , but it’s not  _ comfortable _ . 

Thinking is hard. His thoughts are muted, pushed back in his mind by the vapours that used to be his brain, and he can’t get enough of a grasp on them to fully realise their potential. It’s hard to keep his eyes open, and the gentle pulsing in his temples increases in intensity the longer he tries to. His head feels heavy in a very literal sense, like gravity is pulling it down into the couch while his legs are floating somewhere above him. Like the room is tilted at a forty-five degree angle.

He can’t sleep, is the thing. Napping isn’t– napping isn’t a thing he can  _ do _ . He’s so tired that he can’t move and yet wakefulness won’t let him go. His foggy brain offers him a snippet of song, a Coldplay lyric,  _ when you feel so tired but you can't sleep _ , and he’d snort in amusement if he had the energy to do so. 

It’s not really funny. He is too tired to sleep, and the frustration of it makes him want to cry, but he’s too tired to do that, too. The back of his eyes prickle, and he sobs dryly into the blanket, hoping that it will relieve the fluttering feeling in his chest.

It doesn’t, and now the boredom’s settled in. He pulls out his phone, but flipping through apps doesn’t help. His brain is too fuzzy to reply to emails and texts, words slipping from his grasp before he can fully form a sentence. He tries to read, but he can’t glean any meaning from the words. He loses steam half way through a game, unable to find the energy to care or try.

He puts on some music and leaves the phone by his pillow as he closes his eyes. Ten minutes later, he’s reaching over to turn it off as the pulsing in his head gets worse.

He stares at the ceiling above him, and doesn’t even have the energy to feel miserable.

* * *

He’s feeling a little better by the time Steph arrives. Not much, but he can actually read, now, and once he’d broken through the wall of answering one text message, the rest didn’t seem too bad. (He’ll save the emails for when he’s properly awake, though.)

“Hey, boy wonder,” Steph greets, crawling through the window. Tim has long since grown used to his family never using the door. She takes a couple steps into the room and stops as he twists around to look at her, wincing. “Bad day?”

Tim shrugs. “Just tired,” he replies. He braces himself before pushing himself into a sitting position, and takes a moment to catch his breath. He knows what he must look like, rumpled shirt and messy bedhead, pale and expressionless with deep bags beneath his eyes.

“You’re always tired,” Steph says, making her way to the kitchen. “Your insomnia getting bad again?”

Tim shrugs, forcing himself to his feet. “It’s not been too bad,” he says, truthful for once. Ever since he can remember, he’s had trouble sleeping. It’s not unusual for him to go to bed and spend two or more hours lying awake, exhausted and unable to sleep. “About an hour, I think.”   
“Hey, that’s great!” Steph says, grinning at him, utterly genuine. Tim finds it in himself to smile back, feels his skin crack with the effort.

It takes the average person seven minutes to fall asleep.

He finds himself sitting at the breakfast bar as Steph busies herself in the kitchen, grabbing ingredients from the cupboard, fridge, and freezer as she chatters about her day and her classes at Gotham U. At some point, Tim notices her pour the remainder of the coffee in the pot down the sink, and remembers the mug on the coffee table, cold and long-forgotten.

“I should help,” he says as Steph starts preparing the food. Steph pauses, turning and looking at him with pursed lips. And he knows, he  _ knows _ what he looks like, but he just– he wants to help. Because he got a decent amount of sleep last night. He’s barely even done anything today, while she’s been busy. He’s just  _ tired _ . Most people are tired, and they can still make their own food.

“You sure?” she asks. Tim nods, and she sighs. “Okay, but you have to do exactly what I tell you, alright? I don’t want you ruining this meal with your subpar cooking skills.”   
“Who says my skills are subpar?” Tim asks. She shoots him a look.

“I’ve eaten your cooking,” she says, and, yeah, that’s fair, Tim supposes.

“Right, got it,” he says. “Following instructions.”

He settles into a rhythm, and feels the weight lift from his shoulders, just a little bit. It’s not that he’s inherently a  _ bad _ cook. He just doesn’t have the energy, most of the time. The amount of prep work that goes into cooking is just so  _ much _ , and he knows if he tries, he’ll never finish– or, even if he does manage to complete the task, he won’t be able to do anything afterwards. And eating isn’t that much of a priority.

It’s not  _ healthy _ . He never claimed it was. 

He finishes his Steph-assigned tasks and she sends him to sit back down as she finishes up and sets two plates down on the breakfast bar, before sliding into a stool next to him. “So,” she says, “You excited for this stakeout?”   
Tim groans. “Stakeouts make me wonder why I signed up for this job,” he says.

“Don’t they? Like, everyone thinks being a vigilante is big exciting fights and saving people, but a lot of it is just staring at a warehouse until your eyes fall out of your head!” 

They discuss the mission as they eat. Or, well, as Steph eats. Tim tries to, he really does. He hasn’t eaten all day, and he’s  _ starving _ , but nausea wells up in him every time he takes a bite.

He’s had this meal plenty of times before. He  _ likes _ it. But today it feels like the most disgusting thing in the world, and he can’t swallow without a mouthful of water to wash it down.

Steph notices. Of course she does. Tim really hates being part of the most observant vigilante family in the world, sometimes.

“Not good?” she asks. Tim shakes his head.

“No, it’s good! I’m just not very hungry, is all.” He smiles at her. “I grabbed lunch on my way back from the office this afternoon.”   
Steph rolls her eyes. “It’s not lunch if you have it in the afternoon!”

“Lunch is the second meal of the day.”   
“Nuh-uh. Lunch is the midday meal. What you had, my friend, was dunch.”

_ “Dunch?”  _

“Or linner.”

Tim laughs and rolls his eyes and tries not to feel bad for lying.

He barely finishes half his plate.

* * *

He gets back after the stakeout, pulls off his uniform, and collapses almost immediately into bed. The heaviness is back again, the exhaustion, and he wants nothing more than to sleep.

Behind the fuzziness, though, he can feel the restlessness, the churning of his mind, the restless vibrations in his body that say,  _ you didn’t do anything today. You did nothing to earn your tiredness and so you won’t be able to sleep. _

It’s not like he can get up and do anything to make himself tired because, well, he’s  _ already _ tired. But he’s used to this. He reaches over and double-checks that his alarm is set for his regular 7AM start, winces at the clock declaring that it’s already almost three, and then rolls over and pulls the covers over his head. He runs through the events of that night in his head, plans his day tomorrow.

Thinks as hard as he possibly can, until his thoughts run away from him and he’s able to sleep at last.

* * *

There’s a noise. Tim groans, pulling the covers closer. The noise doesn’t go away. “Shut  _ up _ ,” he mutters. He can’t for the life of him figure out where it’s coming from, or what it means.

It doesn’t matter. He pulls the quilt over his ears and sinks back down into sleep.

* * *

There’s a noise. Tim blinks his eyes open, and then closes them again immediately.  _ What is that noise? _ It’d been in his dreams, too. A car alarm, or something? He can’t really remember. Weird that it’s followed him here. It’s not like he owns a car.

* * *

Tim bolts upright in bed, eyes wide and breathing heavy, and slams the button to turn his alarm off. Already, its almost 8AM, and he cringes knowing he’s going to be late to his morning meeting.

It’s not the worst he’d overslept– he remembers one weekend where he’d slept through an alarm for  _ four hours _ – but it’s going to make him look unprofessional, and the people he works with are already looking for any excuse to tear him down.

Fuelled by adrenaline, he jumps out of bed and throws on some clothes. He gets to the office a record thirty minutes later, sitting down at his desk with a takeaway cup of coffee and a thump. Tam enters the room seconds later.

“You’re late,” she comments. Tim winces. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I overslept.”

“At least you’re sleeping,” she replies with a huff. “Have you got the paperwork you need?”   
“Yeah,” Tim says, picking up the stack she’d placed aside for him. “Which room’s the meeting in, again?”

She rolls her eyes. “Just follow me,” she instructs, and Tim grins at her.

“Thanks, Tam. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“God help us all.”

He follows her down the hall, the last of his morning panic fading, replaced by the heavy exhaustion that’s become an all too familiar companion these days. It’s fine. He’s fine. He’s used to this by now. (He wishes desperately that he didn’t have to be used to it.)

(Wishes he could just be  _ awake _ , no strings attached.)

“Ready?” Tam asks him as they approach the meeting room door.

“Of course,” Tim replies, flashing her a smile.

He gathers his fumes and opens the door.

**Author's Note:**

> that last line is meant to be a play on "running on fumes." i'm not sure if that totally comes across so i thought i'd clarify.
> 
> i mentioned this issue to my therapist last autumn and she told me to speak to my doctor. i was then told i had an iron deficiency, went on iron supplements for 2 months, came back and was told i'd never had an iron deficiency in the first place and my problems would go away by themselves and to come back when there was no longer a plague.
> 
> i had an appointment with a different doctor recently and was prescribed exercise and a regular sleep schedule.
> 
> ....i'm very tired and the past couple of weeks have been very hard. hope you enjoyed the fic!
> 
> feel free to hmu on tumblr @bullyingbatfam !


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